The excessively violent, persistently provocative and daringly entertaining epic never shies away from the sensational. A pack of vicious dogs chews apart a slave. A naked black woman gets yanked from her underground prison. A man savagely beats another with his bare fists.

Ugly images, yes, but this is no empty-headed wallow. While in many regards, Tarantino is an enfant terrible — just look what he did with history in “Inglorious Basterds” — he’s also a bold artist with a deep passion for movies and filmmaking with blood and guts.

For the most part, “Django Unchained” finds Tarantino in fine form and carting out his signature staples: blood-spurting shootouts, cheeky dialogue, movie references and a quirky, killer soundtrack. The film’s absurd Christmas Day release date is conspiring against it, and given the horrific tragedy that unfolded last week in Newtown, Conn., the collective tolerance for such in-your-face cinematic extremism likely will reach a new low. Yet “Django” shouldn’t be branded as trash, then summarily reviled and dismissed. Under the guise of a hilarious exploitation flick, it has big, if not always fully realized, ambitions.

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Its most audacious goal is to make us bear witness to the ugliness of racism and the pure horror of slavery. Overall, there’s much more good and ugly than just plain bad represented here, even if a few bits fall flat, including a Ku Klux Klan encounter that’s just not very clever.

Set two years before the Civil War, “Django” follows unshackled slave Django (Jamie Foxx) and bounty hunter King Schultz (Oscar-winner Waltz) as they tangle with all sorts of Southern characters while bagging “most wanted” bad guys and searching for Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

The trail Django and Schultz follow — at one point juxtaposed against the hilarious accompaniment of Jim Croce’s “I’ve Got a Name” — leads to gory choreographed shootouts, an encounter with a slick but dangerous plantation owner (Don Johnson, delivering one of his most successful performances), right up to the main prize: the Candyland plantation, run by evil dandy Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a sicko who, for sport, holds bloody “Mandingo” fights in his swanky parlor.

Playing against those boyish good looks, DiCaprio makes Calvin a charismatic monster; it’s a pleasure to see him branch out from low-hanging-fruit roles of leading men. Here, he demonstrates just how well he can pull off portraying a loathsome cur. However, the scene-stealer is Tarantino go-to guy Samuel L. Jackson as Candie’s right-hand man, Stephen, a slave who’s averse to any change in the master-slave dynamic. With his stooped posture, baffled expression and weirdly righteous outrage, Jackson makes Stephen the film’s most fascinating character.

He’s certainly more interesting than Django, a stock, one-dimensional Tarantino character — much like Uma Thurman’s The Bride in “Kill Bill” — with a single-minded purpose. Foxx expresses Django’s simmering and eventually seething fury with steely-eyed intensity, but the role — as written by Tarantino — doesn’t allow for much more than standard vengeance. The supporting parts are better drawn, including Waltz’s kooky dentist/bounty hunter.

These unusual characters, combined with the stunning plantation set pieces, frequent humorous bits (Tarantino has a terrific cameo) and rich Tarantino dialogue, not to mention well-staged action sequences, make “Django” one of Tarantino’s finer efforts.

Does it always work? No. But Tarantino’s brazen “Django” is one bloody — with the emphasis on bloody — good time.